India’s leading stock exchange, National Stock Exchange of India Limited (NSE) announced that it is conducting tests to use blockchain for E-Voting for listed companies on Elemential Labs platform.

The pilot, which has been conducted would involve setting up a blockchain to connect the regulator with the company and the RTA during the voting process. The voting rights will be tokenized, thus making them easy to transfer and proxy. The test will be evaluated on the auditability of the actions on the chain as well as the ease of conducting the process using blockchain.

“The immutable nature of blockchain will ensure that every action taken by a network participant is transparent to the regulator. Additionally, the smart contract framework enables synchronization of the vote count process between the company and the regulator in real time. These features will take us closer to an environment of improved corporate governance and compliance.” – Sankarson Banerjee, CTO-Projects, NSE.

The pilot, aimed at providing a highly transparent and low-risk solution for E-Voting, would enhance the transparency in the voting process. The blockchain will be built using the Elemential platform on the Hyperledger framework. The SI partner is NSE IT, which is in charge of building and managing the front-end application.

Blockchain enables a real-time, immutable trail of all activities for the regulator. This brings us a step closer to highly transparent and clear corporate governance; an operating standard that most companies aspire to attain. The popularity of blockchain has moved from cryptocurrency to business applications across many industries such as insurance, finance, supply chain logistics, digital identity, healthcare and the public sector.